Problems for Mr Blunkett

Sunday 7 July 2002 23:00 BST

Evening Standard editorial comment

The spotlight will be on David Blunkett this week as never before. He is undoubtedly one of the big hitters of this Government, and he has made an impressive start as Home Secretary. The public respect Mr Blunkett's plain-speaking manner; he is patently sincere in his wish to make a real difference in all the areas for which he is responsible. However, the Home Office is a notoriously tricky portfolio that in the past has ruined many a promising political career. Mr Blunkett is a realist, but he will find over the next few days that the realities - on Labour's record on crime and the debate on the future of drugs policy - are a lot tougher than he might have imagined.

On Friday, new crime figures are due to appear that will be deeply unwelcome to the Home Secretary. Crime statistics should always be taken with a large pinch of salt and the number of times the methods of collating them have been changed complicates matters further. But these figures will clearly show that while all offences have risen, violent crime has increased at an alarming rate - particularly in London. Muggings rose by 38 per cent in the capital last year. Mr Blunkett has to show that Labour has policies that will make the public feel the streets are safe. He must reiterate that all the necessary resources - in money and support from the judicial system - will be made available to the police. It is lamentable that while crime rates are soaring the level of detection has dropped so far that in London only one offence in four results in a conviction.

On drugs policy, Mr Blunkett has to square a circle. On Wednesday he is expected to announce that cannabis will be reclassified from a Class B drug to Class C. Rightly or wrongly this will send out the dangerous signal, particularly to young people, that smoking cannabis is in effect legal. It will not be. At the same time the Home Secretary will double the maximum sentence for cannabis dealers to 10 years. The public will be confused by this twin track approach. One of the failures of the "softly softly? experiment against cannabis use in Brixton has been that it has resulted in a clear increase in use of the drug by children. Mr Blunkett insists that there will be draconian measures against pushers who deal to children or anywhere near a school; but we have serious doubts that these safeguards will work in practice. We fear that children will be put at greater risk by liberalising the cannabis laws.

We wish Mr Blunkett well. But, on crime and drugs, he has a major problem convincing the voters that so far he has found the answers.

Summer of discontent

After five years of New Labour, council workers, postal workers, teachers, firefighters and train drivers have all suddenly decided that they are badly paid and need to go on strike for more money. The militancy of the unionised public service workers is shaping up to produce a summer of discontent, in which children are sent home early from school, rubbish piles up in the streets, mailboxes are sealed and there are, if possible, even worse delays on the Tube.

The three unions - Unison, the GMB and the Transport and General Workers, who between them represent 1.2 million local government employees - are demanding double the 3 per cent rise offered by employers, and are so sure of success in their ballot for industrial action that they have already set the date of the first stoppage in mid-July. Why have the unions chosen this moment to force a showdown with Tony Blair?

The interview we carry today with Kenneth Clarke, who of all the senior Tories is the least prone to score party political points for the sake of them, provides a useful insight. Mr Clarke believes that the Government has no clear idea how to set about reforming the public services, and therefore responds to their frustrations by throwing money at them. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has poured billions of pounds into the black hole of the National Health Service, not with any clear idea of how it will turn the NHS around, but in order to curb the rising levels of complaint. Seeing this, as Mr Clark puts it, "the lads are rushing in?. If the Government panders to them, we could find ourselves back in the bad old days of the 1970s, with the difference that the unions have now learned to minimise the risk to their members' pay packets by holding one-day and two-day strikes at regular intervals. Mr Blair's ministers need to spend more time talking to the trade unions and winning their leaders around to the Government's strategy for the public services - that is, if it has one.